


The rooms collapsing in your mind

by paynesgrey



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-19
Updated: 2011-05-19
Packaged: 2017-10-19 14:32:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/201898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paynesgrey/pseuds/paynesgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The uneasiness Amy feels about Rory becomes overwhelming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The rooms collapsing in your mind

  
She’s standing in that room again. Amelia Pond, tethered to a grimy place that isn’t supposed to be here but _is here_ , right in the corner of her eye, right where she doesn’t want to see.

She could have played here. She and Aunt Sharon could have cleaned it up, painted the room deep blue and hung her drawings on the crack-free wall. Little Amelia could have stood in the center, twirling about, tricking her mind and thinking the room was actually bigger than it was.

Instead she dreams of a dirty room, with moving shadows and monsters that leave a line of slime over her head.

Her mind brings her here often. She looks around, and the air stops dry in her throat, and she wakes before she can scream.

  
.xxxxx.

  
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” the Doctor says annoyed. Amy doesn’t mean to come here. She just sort of appears, walking through the TARDIS aimlessly, her thoughts reaching out to where the Doctor might be.

“Is this where you sleep?” she asks, looking around. She spins in a full circle but the walls always change: books, gadgets, trinkets, toys, memories, clothes and angry shadows. “What is this place?”

The Doctor takes her hand and suddenly they’re running. “It’s where I _think_ , now hold on, Pond.”

She blinks and they’re in the control room. She makes a face at him. “You said you’d show me the pool.”

The Doctor gives her a long hard look. She scratches her nose, feeling exposed under his stare. She narrows her eyes at him. “What? Do I have something on my face?”

“Something’s off. I can’t put my head around it, but something is _wrong_ ,” he says fretting.

Amy shrugs and grins wistfully. “Nothing’s wrong, Doctor.”

“Where’s Rory?” he demands in a shout, coming up to her face and leaning so close their foreheads ghost against each other.

Amy blinks bewildered. “Who?”

The TARDIS lurches them both forward, and Amy feels the floor cracking against her head.

  
.xxxxx.

  
Back in boring Leadworth, Rory is lying in her lap and eating crisps as they watch the Royal Wedding on the telly.

“Aha! There he is! Look, in the crowd. Wily Doctor! I do think he is waving at _us_ ,” Rory says laughing.

Stuck in a daze, Amy doesn’t answer him. She stares at his toes. Her heart is racing, and she starts to have those feelings again - feelings when she doesn’t know who Rory is, that he’s a stranger or a comfortable fantasy that’s grown out of her head. She hears her psychiatrist’s voice sometimes, the one that she didn’t bite, and she’s telling her: “He’s just an imaginary friend. He’s not _real_.”

She blinks when Rory calls to her. In his face she sees the man she’s supposed to love. The man she _loves_. Her mind is always correcting itself, having one thought, deleting it, and then having another.

“Earth to Amy!” Rory finally says, and she looks down at him, frightened for a second. _How can I forget Rory?_ She thinks.

Before he can become worried, she grabs his face and quiets his voice with a desperate snog.

.xxxxx.

  
She jolts awake. Amy can see nothing but white. White, white and whiter, consuming her like an explosion of gesso.

“She’s coming in and out again.” A voice, a woman she doesn’t know.

“It’s alright, just rest now,” the voice says.

Amy wants to be frightened. She wants to stay awake.

But the white defeats her.

.xxxxx.

Gray mixes with dark, and Amy blinks her eyes open. She has no sense of time. She thinks she’s hearing River consoling her, telling her to hang on. She thinks she’s hearing the Doctor, screaming for her to watch her head. But she doesn’t hear Rory. Rory has died, and she’s cried and tried to revive him many futile times. His lifeless body is beside her, but she refuses to leave him. She can hang on, but she can’t leave him. Not when she thinks Rory can be saved.

Amy still has hope. Rory can be saved right? She’s saved him before, even from nonexistence.

River and the Doctor fight the unseen monsters around her. She’s inconsolable and no help to them. Amy gazes through bleary eyes and tries to find her enemy, the killer of her Rory.

The Silence, she realizes in a sob. She buries her face in Rory’s chest and wishes that the universe can reboot itself again.

  
.xxxxx.

The Doctor feels guilty, and Amy is mourning, so she takes advantage. Perhaps in the back of her heart she’s always wanted this – lusting after the Doctor, loving the thrill of an impossible chase. In her thoughts he never rejects her; she smiles at him, snaps the elastic on his suspenders and bends him to her will.

This doesn’t happen in real life.

When he accepts her kiss, he’s crying. Amy almost stops, but she wants this so bad, and maybe in time and space she’ll never have another chance. All the flirting, all the bad jokes, she’ll stop all of it if she can just have him like this – to comfort her now that her husband is dead.

They’re in the room he’s forbidden from her, and she slides over his body, pulling away at his clothes as his arms and hands move helplessly, idly over her. She pulls him into a long kiss, silencing his pitiful sob.

When he pulls away, his forehead nuzzles against hers. “Oh, Amy, Amy.”

It’s the last thing he says as she pulls his trousers over his hips and starts to ride him. He makes pained, yet satisfied noises under her, and she arches her back, pulling him deeper inside.

The ship hums around them as he sighs with relief, and she bends down and kisses him tenderly on the forehead, the spot on her where he’s always marked for himself. She comes down, curls her body around his, and his slender arms wrap her protectively against him.

He draws the covers over them both, and he lets her sleep.

She doesn’t dream that night, not when the Doctor is lying awake next to her, breathing coarsely and feeling the weight of the universe crush over his hearts.

  
.xxxxx.

  
Amy comes back to that room. She wakes with a tear streaming down her face, and she jumps, looks around and notices she’s wearing her police woman costume again.

The Doctor is shouting at her from the hallway, chained to her radiator.

“Whatever you do, don’t look at it!”

She doesn’t listen. Amy _always_ looks.

  
.xxxxx.

  
She’s reciting her wedding vows, looking into Rory’s eyes. He smiles at her as the Doctor watches them, grinning fondly in the background.

Amy has her Rory back again.

.xxxxx.

  
The damn ticking of the clock makes her want to bloody scream, but she sits patiently as her psychiatrist scribbles on her notes. This is a new one. She bit the last one, and after that, not many people wanted to deal with her.

For some reason, Dr. Song thinks of her as an interesting sort of challenge.

“Tell me about your friend, the Doctor,” she says with a kind smile. Amy knows she’s forcing politeness, but she looks into the woman’s clear eyes and responds anyway.

“He’s kind, the last of his people, and he’s going to come back and take me to see the stars in his blue time machine,” Amy says, feeling a blush as she thinks of him.

“Alright,” she says, and writes and writes some more.

“Now tell me about your imaginary friend.”

Amy pauses and wrinkles her nose. “Sorry?”

“Your friend, the boy, Rory is his name? Tell me about him,” she says, resting her chin on her palm with an interested stare.

“He’s not…Rory’s not imaginary! He lives just down the street and we play together and…”

Dr. Song looks away. “Uh huh,” she says. She writes some more.

  
.xxxxx.

Amy wonders. _I created Rory once; I could have created him again. But did I really create him? He was always real enough to me, more real than the Doctor ever was?_

“Doctor, do you think…no, it’s silly,” she says, finding him tinkering in the control room. She starts pacing around the center, her arms crossed and her face deep in concentration. She waits for Rory to get out of the shower, but finds that this is the perfect time to talk about her uneasy feelings with the Doctor.

“Hrmm?” he says with moderate interest. The TARDIS takes the majority of his attention now.  
“Do you think it’s possible, after the universe rebooted again, that I created Rory, that he’s not even real?”

The Doctor pauses. He snaps up from his makeshift work-bench and runs to her. He looks into her face, rudely bursting through her personal space. He’s obviously concerned about her theory.

“What do you mean? Rory is as real as you and I,” he states, almost furiously.

“But…why? Why does he almost die every time we get caught up in danger? Is the universe punishing me? Is Rory not really supposed to exist?” She’s in hysterics now, and the Doctor grabs her shoulders and shakes her.

“Stop talking nonsense, Pond! The universe doesn’t work that way!” he says.

“How do you know, yeah?” Amy challenges him, and when the Doctor opens his mouth to set her straight again, Amy feels a crippling pain in her stomach. She doubles over, screaming as the Doctor catches her.

She curls into his arms, still in agony as the pain refuses to numb.

Her vision becomes cloudy, and Amy wonders that maybe the universe is really punishing her.

.xxxxx.

She’s watching them; Rory and the Doctor are mourning her in the TARDIS room, but she knows she’s here with them, but they don’t seem to notice her. They don’t even seem to _know_ that she’s even in the room.

“You could still travel with me,” the Doctor says hopefully. He puts a comforting hand on Rory’s shoulder as her husband stares numbly at the floor.

Rory shakes his head. “No. I don’t think I can…not when…”

“It’s your choice. I’m sorry, Rory. I’m so, so very sorry,” he says, and Rory leans against him. He’s sobbing as the Doctor snakes his arms around him.

“It should have been me,” he whines. “It should have been me.” Rory pulls away with fierce desperation. “Doctor, isn’t there something we can do? Go back in time…”

The Doctor shakes his head immediately, hushing Rory’s last sliver of hope.

 _“Hey!”Amy says, but they do not react. “You idiots, I’m right here! Why can’t you see me? Are you that thick! HELLO. Stupid-face, quit crying, I’m right here and I’m FINE!_

“I understand if you want to leave, Rory,” the Doctor says, meeting his eyes. “But I could really use you for one last journey.”

 _“Oh that’s just rich! Hit on my husband while I’m dead and gone!” Amy says, but she already knows that she has no room to talk. “I’m the girl who waited, remember? I can’t be replaced!”_

“Why?” Rory says, his eyes streaming with tears. “What good will it do?”

The Doctor hugs him again. He laughs a little, and Rory feels the rumble of the man’s chest next to his. “Oh, I don’t know,” he says sighing. “Loneliness, I suppose. Isn’t that always the answer?”

 _Amy stomps her foot, rushing over to them both, clawing through their figures, trying to fight but finding nothing but air. “What?” she howls, and before she can punch through them again, a hand grabs her from behind._

  
.xxxxx.

She’s falling down a vortex of white and blue. She’s scared from the falling, but despite this, she feels a sense of calm here – like a familiar place she’s come to call home.

She blinks, and a woman in a Victorian dress is standing before her. “You! You’re…that mad woman.”

She smiles. “The TARDIS, yes. Don’t worry, orange girl. I’ve sustained your life for now.”

Amy shakes her head. “They both think I’m dead.”

“You were, but now you’re not. It’s confusing, maddening even – I can’t figure it out. He can’t figure it out either – but he’s known awhile now, what’s wrong with you, that your life has been in danger ever since that time in the desert.”

Amy freezes. “Utah... the Astronaut.”

“I don’t know how to save you, only to sustain you. Something’s wrong – but he’ll fix it. He’ll save you.”

“The Doctor?”

She cocks her head and smiles. “And the pretty one.”

Amy lifts an eyebrow.

“Now, go back. I’ll end up absorbing your energy if you stay too long,” she says.

“You don’t need to tell me twice!” Amy grumbles, and the TARDIS’s avatar looks at her curiously. “Thanks,” Amy adds.

And she's gone.

  
.xxxxx.

  
“Doctor, there’s a problem. She’s bleeding internally!” cries someone, another younger female’s voice. Someone Amy thinks she’s heard, but doesn’t recognize.

“Stabilizing!” She feels a cool cloth on her forehead – almost like a kiss.

“Stay with us, Amy!” It’s a male voice this time.

“She’s contracting!”

“Time to prep her,” says a calm, controlled voice. Sounding dark, malicious even, Amy hears the voice again. “Finally, at long last this is what we’ve been waiting for.”

.xxxxx.

Rory is holding her in his arms, sobbing his thanks that she’s alive. He makes promises to her, mostly that he won’t be so stupid anymore, and she can say whatever she wants to him, only that she can’t die – not like this, not now when he’s gotten her back.

The Doctor is buzzing his sonic screwdriver over her and holding her hand.

“She’s stabilizing, but barely,” he says. Amy turns her head to him, and their eyes meet. He wipes the sweat off her brow, and her Doctor smiles down at her. Amy doesn’t feel the hope.

“It’s my turn to die, Doctor; isn’t it?” Amy cries in a fit, feeling the ache hollowing out her stomach like a parasite.

Rory holds her tightly, still weeping, and the Doctor kisses her forehead with a hard smack.

“No,” the Raggedy Doctor says, and her Rory still looks tense, but he sighs a bit of relief.

“No, you won’t, Amelia Pond. You know that we won’t let you.”

  
END


End file.
